Powering your presence with Youtube Analytics

Youtube Analytics helped blogger Diane Harrigan improve the tags she uses for her videos, resulting in more blog traffic.

YouTube Analytics just launched a new interface to offer fresh insight into who’s watching your videos, what the impactful drivers are and an in-depth look into your own channel’s discovery pattern.

If you’re like me, you want to know how people find your videos and how long searches remain active. Just like with press releases, it helps to get a handle around which keywords or key phrases are being used to find your content — and how long it’s popular.

I maintain a YouTube Channel of original San Francisco travel videos that has generated slightly over 50,000 views over the last three years. One video on the “Wave Organ” (wave-activated acoustic sculpture in the San Francisco Bay) generated over 1059 views according to YouTube analytics.

I never thought to call it a ‘sea organ’ or ‘drum sculpture’, but those phrases led to viewers finding the video according to YouTube’s enhanced metrics; so I should include as tags. A video on a popular sax player at the BART station was found under “weekend player subway”. The word ‘weekend’ is certainly key to when he performs. But it was missing from my description.

“Traffic Sources” is one of the cooler categories of the YouTube Analytics upgrade. You can collect data around what people are typing into the Google as well as YouTube search engines to find your work, uncover which related videos connect viewers to your channel, and which external sites embed your video. An ocean blog entitled “The Scuttlefish” highlighted my Wave Organ video in a segment about “tide organs of the world” (who knew there were so many?). I discovered people are still discovering and watching this piece 19 months after I uploaded it onto YouTube. YouTube Analytics revealed it received 60 views in the last month.

It’s never too late to add tags to your video, re-name it altogether, or re-invent it by linking it to other videos. One fabulous feature of YouTube is the ability to create Playlists — aggregating your top five performing videos for example. A Playlist has its own URL and generates Google juice all its own.

A lot of great articles have emerged since last week’s launch of YouTube Analytics, including this case study on SEOMOZ– that takes a deep dive into each screen display.

YouTube is certainly an important distribution channel for PR Newswire and other media properties under the UBM umbrella — such as TechWeb which puts on numerous live events which are recorded and uploaded to various video sites. One of PR Newswire’s Bay Area Account Managers — Natalie Bering — caught up with Video Producer Dan Resciniti this week to discuss how he’s leveraging the latest era of YouTube Analytics:

Author Diane Harrigan is an account manager with PR Newswire. In her spare time, she authors the Postcards from SF blog, a video blog highlighting events an noteworthy sights in San Francisco.

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